Spare Parts (dp X Dc Prompt)

Spare Parts (dp x dc prompt)

Warning for Fanon-typical vivisection.

The Bats have a new case where bodies keep having organs taken from them. This happens in morgues, to bodies found on the street, with absolutely nothing in common except for one thing.

The bodies with stolen organs all have little notes. Last words. Wills. Passwords to safes and bank accounts, sweet I love yous to spouses and kids. Some rather specific info from a body that was identified to be a gang member, which allowed the bats to catch the boss (who had betrayed the guy.)

Almost as if the ghosts are writing these notes.

And, well, they are dictating them. Phantom is the one writing them for the spirits, and in return, he’s taking body parts as payment.

He doesn’t care if a liver is past expiration date and therefore the living can’t use it as a transplant. A little ecto will fix it right up, and he can put it into his body, frozen in a fusion of his ice and clockworks time. He’s not fully dead. Just… split. That’s fine though.

He just needs to replace the parts that got ripped out of him in the vivisection.

DCxDP fic idea: The Summoned Demon

Danny is sitting in class, trying to make sense of Mr. Lancer's explanation of the light getting through Scrooge's nightcap in A Christmas Carol. The light symbolizes him trying to suppress memories, but he cannot, so it passes the cloth he clings to when a portal appears around his desk.

He doesn't even notice it is forming until Flash screams. He turns his head to see what the bully plans to do to him- because he always intends to bother him somehow- only to find the blond pointing down to the ground.

Or, more specifically, the glowing circle of runes leaking ectoplasm in a slow swirling mess, filling until it reached the middle—right under Danny.

His other classmates also scream when they notice it, but before they or anyone else can do anything, the portal fully forms. Danny makes horrified eye contact with Sam and Tucker before he falls. His scream is louder than the rest, but it's quickly cut off as the portal slams shut.

Danny was not expecting to be thrown through a portal in the middle of the day without his Ghost Scense even being triggered, so instead of thinking rationally and shifting into Phantom, Danny fell. He fell through green swirls of green and black, his nose picking up a disgusting smell of copper, and he flew in the air.

The free fall finally stops when a second portal appears at the end of the slightly downward tunnel. He slams into the hard ground, an echoing splash accompanying his shout of pain, and his tailbone is probably broken when he lands on it. He groans, rolling to his side and hissing in pain.

A few swears escaped him, nothing too bad, but if his mother had heard him, Danny would have to pay half of his allowance in the swear jar, cursing his darn luck.

Some liquid is around him, quickly splashing onto his clothing and on the right side of his face as he presses it to the ground, trying to ease the ache from his fall.

Danny can barely think through the pain- ever grateful that his healing factor was kicking in. If only it stopped him from feeling pain in the first place.

After a moment, he has the strength to pop open an eye and take in his surroundings. He is left staring at a large dark room lit only by candle lights, a fair amount of figures in dark red robes stand a little further down from the stage he sits on, and the horrified faces of three naked teenage girls tied to pillars on stage with him.

Danny sits up, water dripping down the right side of his face onto the ground- He seemed to have landed in some kind of shallow pool, likely would only reach his ankle were he to stand- and gawks.

At once, the room reacts.

When the figures realize Danny is looking at them, they all fall to their knees, bowing so low that their foreheads touch the ground. The candles all start flicking from yellow to dark green flames, making the atmosphere more unsettling.

The three girls start to struggle against their binds, yanking on the ropes that are pulling their limbs in four different directions, but it's to no avail. They are stuck, and they cry against the gags tied to their mouths.

Their cries are what snap him from his confusion.

Danny quickly turns his gaze away, pressing a hand to the side of his face so they do not appear in his peripheral vision. He is not sure what is happening in the world, but he knows to at least respect the women.

One of the figures, wearing a giant head crown around his hood so likely the leader, left its head. It sounds male- old, maybe late to middle sixties- but Danny can't understand a word he's saying.

It doesn't sound like any language he's ever heard before. He just knows that the tone is excited and awed. When he is done speaking, the rest of the bowing crowd starts to chant in that strange, fast-paced language.

"What? What are you saying?" Danny tries, but their chants are louder, and he is still looking at the dark-colored water-covered ground. The chanting grows in volume, and a new circle of runes appears around Danny.

His eyes widen, and he lowers his hand. He turns his back on the girls splashing through the water and lowers his head to try to make out what the symbols are saying.

If they are under the control of whoever those hooded people are, then he is not entirely sure he likes them. He squints, straining his eyes to try and see them clearly, but the green flames are blending the light, and he can't make it out.

"What is this? What are you doing?!" he demanded of the people, forcing himself to stand and turn again to the crowd. He quickly turned his head to the side when he spotted the pillars.

Right, he does not like that they are tied up like that. He needs to get them out. Worried that they will try to stop him, Danny presses his feet firmly into the ground and sprints towards them, pushing some of Phantom's strength into his hands.

It's not a full transformation but it should be enough to give him a little help in setting them free.

The girls' cries grow louder, and they cower away from him. Danny feels bad, but he has no time to reassure them as he reaches towards the metal chains of the one closest to him. He wastes no time in ripping it apart—surprised to find it fall apart like paper.

They had seemed pretty thick, but maybe it was all for show? Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, Danny quickly releases her from her bonds. She screams, kicking at him and throwing punches in a desperate attempt to get away.

He hardly feels it though, pushing her gently away, so he can reach the others. He hears the hooded people cheer, chant, and praise in crazed tones, but Danny has no time for them. He is busy ripping away the chains of the other two.

He then leaps downwards towards the hooded people. They all startle, likely not expecting Danny to come for them- though why they would assume he wouldn't is a mystery- he reaches for the one closest to him.

He grabs hold of the hood, turns it transparent, and pulls it off a teenage boy who is gaping up at him. The teen is shirtless but thankfully wearing pants. Danny turns to the two others next to the boy, doing the same, and is a little surprised to find that they are all teenage boys as well.

The one with the headpiece says something in an "A-ha!" voice, and the three boys pale. They start to beg, their voices raising in panic in that strange language, but Danny ignores them. He rushes back up the stage to find the girls cowering in the center.

They tremble as he throws the stolen hoods at them.

"Here, use that to cover yourselves." He tells them, determinedly turning his gaze to the side. Danny is pretty sure they can't understand him but he hopes his message is clear enough for them to get it.

A cry is heard from the crowd of people in red robes. He twists around, fist raised in case they try to do something to the girls, only to blink in surprise that they are dragging the three boys towards him.

The male teenagers are kicking and screaming; one is crying, and another manages to break away from the hold but is quickly tackled by another. They are thrown at Danny's feet, the rest of the figures chanting.

The last teenage boy weeps, clinging to Danny's leg and begging.

"Dude! Dude!" Danny yelps, stumbling back a bit, but the stranger clings to him hard, not letting him go. "I can't understand you- get off of me!"

One of the red robes, rushes foward and starts to tug at the boy's pants- attempting to get them off against the guy's will!

Danny feels hot rage fill his entire being as he reels back a fist, smashing it against the person's head. "What the hell are you doing!? Leave him alone!"

Now Danny only meant to daze the other person, maybe knock him out if he was lucky. What happens instead is that they are flying clear across the room, smashing against a far wall and slumping to the ground.

The room goes dead silent.

"Wha-?"

That's when the window above them is smashed in, and a man dressed like a bat falls on top of Danny. He yelps, smashing against the ground. Danny flings him, but only barely.

Three other figures follow the weirdo in the bat suit, attacking the people in robes. Their actions blow out the candles, plunging the room into darkness. There is nothing but chaos and screams, so Danny blindly reaches around him, finding the six teenagers and pushing them behind him.

He stands protectively over them as the sounds of battle echo. Eventually, it all goes quiet, and a flashlight is shone on the group of trembling teenagers.

Danny raises his fists, ready for a fight, when one of the teenage boys calls out, sounding to be pleading with the attacking furries. The four figures pause outside the light- their white pupils, eyes narrowing at Danny.

He has never seen ghosts like them before, and he yanks the boy back lest they attack. Danny shifts until he stands before the group again- protecting them. One of the girls- now wearing the stolen robe- managed to remove her gag. She cranes around Danny, speaking in near sobs.

Whatever she says seems to satisfy the strangers, who carefully step out of the shadows. Danny eyes a man in blue, another in a red helmet, a teenager clutching a staff, and a small boy wielding a sword.

He also notices the light is reflecting the dark liquid.

It's red. A nasty horrible dark red that smells like copper.

"Blood," Danny whispers, horrified, looking down at himself covered in it. "This is a kiddie pool of blood."

He knows the strangers are speaking to the teenagers; he can't understand a word they are saying, but there is a rising in his ears. His breathing is coming in fast pants, and he can't look away from the blood that is literally covering his entire right side.

His hands are dripping in it.

The man in the bat suit clutches his arm, speaking slowly, claiming tones. The man takes slow breaths, tightening his grip on Danny's shoulder and repeating the actions. Danny realizes that he's attempting to get him to copy his breathing. He's having a panic attack.

It's been a while since he last had one. It was during a terrible ghost fight that Jazz's suit malfunctioned and she was rushed to the hospital, cloaked in red and clinging to her life.

Danny had never been so afraid in his life.

He is honestly grateful the man seems to be aware he's not going to calm down on his own, and he quickly stabs him with a needle. The world turns dark and blissfully silent in an instant.

_____________________________________________________

"Wait! He didn't do anything wrong!" Molly cries, watching Batman knock out the demon. She tries to rush to Batman but is quickly detained by Red Robin, who steps into her path. "He saved us!"

"We saw him protecting you." Red Robin tells her gently. "We aren't going to hurt him."

"Do you promise?" Jack asks, his voice still trembling slightly. He is on the ground, holding out his leg so Nightwing can diffuse the bomb strap to his ankle.

The cultists had kidnapped anyone from the age of fourteen to seventeen who was unfortunate enough to be at the park the day before. To prevent them from running away and ruining the sacrificial summons, they placed bombs on all of their bodies.

The girls had been the ones who were tied to the altar, but the boys were plan B in case the demon preferred males. The bombs would explode if they got too far from the stage.

For a second, Jack had thought they were all done for when something had fallen through the manic cultists' portal. It had spoken in harsh, rapid hissing noises, rolling around in the blood before sitting upright in near statue-like stillness.

Jack had been relieved when it had approached the girls in the dark corner of his heart. If it took the virgin girls, he would live and leave unharmed. Then, it rejected the sacrifices for him and his two friends.

Jack had been sure that there was no escaping his fate, but if he could offer himself to the creature- no matter how human-looking it was- then at least his friends would be spared. He clung to its legs, begging it to choose him as a meal or a bed warmer instead of Liam or Alex

He made offer after offer, praying it would choose him and not his best friends, as his friends beg Jack to stop. They went ignored because the demon wasn't looking convinced; if anything, it looked disgusted.

He had only a few seconds of terror when one of the cultists ordered him to strip for the demon when it had defended him instead. Three tugs on his pants were all it took to send the monster flying- and he didn't mean the demon that was summoned.

He hates to think that after all it did for them, the Bats would punish it instead.

"You have my word," Batman growls, holding the demon over his shoulder and vanishing into the darkness. The rest of the Bats vanish with him.

Jack sighed in relief as the doors were kicked open, and the police rushed to the scene. He gets to live another day, and his boys are safe, too. That's all he could ask from this hellish nightmare.

Alfred has a relative???

Recently, Alfred had received a letter from a 'relative' of his for reasons unknown to the batfam. Alfred seemed happy about it so none of them minded too much, even when the butler said that said relative would be visiting since they hadn't been able to see each other in many years.

A few days later there is a knock on the manor's door and one of the batkids opens it to see this young adult dressed in modern yet formal attire asking if Alfred lives there.

They assume that the man is a cousin or something similar of Alfred's, until the man all but squeals like a banshee at the sight of the butler and beelines for him before doting on him.

None of them were prepared for the young adult- if he even is one at this point- to call Alfred "his boy" and for Alfred to refer to him as "father/papa".

-----

*knock on the door*

Tim: *opens door* hello?

Danny: Hi, does Alfred Pennyworth live/work here?

Tim: Yes??? Why do you ask?

Danny: Well you see-

Alfred: Young master Tim, who might be at the door?

Danny: *Squeals* My little Alfie!!

Tim, watching Danny rush over to Alfred and start pinching his cheeks: what the-

After the JL was able to make that raging dragon calm down, They finally got him what he wanted. A rock? A thief had stolen; what got him to rage that much?  He returned to a human body as he looked up and down at his rock to make sure it was his nice space rock. 

Danny, as the new guardian of the Amulet of Aragon, had gotten the problem of collecting things. And the nice space rocks are his! Dragon possessive, and a dragon ghost even more.  After being thankful, he turned to a dragon and did fly away. 

Later Justice League

Bruce:" So... how old do you think the dragon was?" Zatanna:" He is a whelp. I don't think even past 15 years old... No!" Bruce:" I can give him many space rocks so he doesn't go berserk again." Zatanna:" We can just find a place for him to hide it better! Diana is already doing it. She said:" I want to make sure the poor baby dragon isn't killed and truly extinct."

Bruce:" So I just need to talk with Diana. Sounds easy. "

"Daniel Fenton, after much consideration, myself and my fellow Observants have decreed you the chosen hero for another world. You will be given a body which better suits it, and a blessing from an Ancient of your choice in order to complete your quest."

Danny, sitting in his haunt with the rest of his family, all of them ghosts now, doesn't know what to say.

Like, seriously, what the fuck does anyone say to that?

Then his brain finally kicks into gear. He's gotta be dreaming. He hasn't dreamed in many hundreds of years, but this has to be a dream.

"Uh, Nocturne, am I-?"

"Nocturne it is! Good luck, Chosen Hero!"

The Observant slaps Danny, Danny blinks, turns to snap at him-

-and he's...in a decrepit ship?

He tries to stand up, only to propel himself into one of the ship walls.

He looks down.

That's a tail. He's underwater.

Did...did he just get reverse Arieled?

First things first, he needs to find out how to move with a tail instead of legs and a distinct lack of ghostly powers. After that, clothes. And after that, he'll see what the hell the Observants meant about a quest.

Or; There are Lazarus Pits forming all over the ocean floor, with not only ghosts coming out of them but demons and all sorts of enemies. With Phantom truly dead, the Observants can't justify sending him to another world to fix it as he has no connection to the living in it. So they opt to go for a loophole; the Chosen Hero Clause. There's...definite drawbacks. He'll lose most if not all of his ghost powers, so they'll need at least one Ancient to grant him some new ones. Clockwork obviously favors the boy, so he'll grant his blessing in his own time. Or not, the Ancient is cryptic and unpredictable. But they have no idea what Nocturne will Bless the boy with, since they thought they were on bad terms. So they give Daniel Fenton a body of a species long thought extinct in his new world, put him in a location close to a relatively small Lazarus Pit, and just...hope for the best.

Sham Sacrifice

(Hi it's time for my favorite headcanon)

...

Vlad Masters sat firm and proper on the Fenton Family couch, legs crossed, teacup pinched in his fingertips, fighting subtly against the sinkhole that came with the mistake of taking Jack’s usual spot on the couch. He appeared with all the same charm and delightfulness of an ant swarm rearranging your picnic.

Danny stood at the doorway, just-still-in-the-kitchen, just not inviting himself to join the adults in the living room where Jack boomed and rambled and Vlad sat so stiff and polite and nice that his tea in his hands was going cold.

“Oh, Danny you’ll love this story—Danny, you should join us—Danny this was, what, summer of ’84? When was that heatwave, Vladdy? The one where you—”

“There’s no need to bore Daniel with the mad ravings of two old kooks, Jack. Kids would rather be off at the mall or—some store, surely. No need to stick around Daniel on my behalf. I assure you I won’t be offended if you leave.”

“No worries, V-man. I’m good right here. I love hearing Dad’s stories." Danny met Vlad's challenge, speaking with more poisonous courtesy than Vlad had proffered first. "In fact I think he should tell a few more, if he’s got more in mind.”

“In fact I do have more in mind—” Jack answered.

Neither Danny nor Vlad were listening to Jack. They held eye-contact, Danny with a stern unblinkingness of a sheepdog on duty. A lot was said without words. A lot was understood when Vlad decided to visit through the front door. Vlad only used the front door when he wanted something.

And it was never good when Vlad wanted something.

“—the core reactor project, yeah? That summer? That was in the lab with no A/C. Top floor. We were sweating like pigs, all of us. And I dared you to eat the really moldy pizza from our fridge the night before and you ralphed right into—”

“—Surely you remember this more fondly than I do. Daniel, really, you can go.”

Not a chance.

“Actually,” Danny answered, brightening some as his opportunity struck. “I am interested in this. For science class I need to write a report on the invention of an important piece of technology. I was gonna ask Mom and Dad about the Ghost Portal. And now that you’re here, I can get the whole history.”

Jack made a giddy little noise. He leaned forward, words primed, but Vlad was quicker to the draw.

“Sorry to say, your faith in me is unfounded. I wasn’t the portal guy back in college—that was always your mother and father’s passion project. I was their skeptic.”

“Bet that’s got you feeling pretty foolish right now, doesn’t it V-man?” Jack chided, a quick jab to Vlad’s ribs that nearly unseated the teacup from his suspended saucer. “Considering the fully-functioning portal right beneath our toes.”

“I hardly feel foolish, Jack. Your calculation for the portal in college was never going to work.”

“What do you mean? Of course it did.” Jack thumped the ground with his foot. “It’s running the old girl right now.”

At this, Vlad’s eyes narrowed. For the first time he’d been shaken off whatever skeezy machinations had brought him in. His pride was being challenged, and by Jack no less.

“Absolutely not. With that calculation? Absolutely not.”

“Well forget the tea biscuits Vlad, because you’re going to be eating your words in a second. Mads, hold my spot,” Jack said, as if anyone was planning to take his spot. He bounced from the couch, scooted from the living room, and vanished into the dark maw of the lab stairs, leaving only the waning beat of his footsteps behind.

His absence filled only a swallowing few seconds. The footsteps returned, bounding upward, creaking with his heavy cadence, and Jack bounced back into the room in much the manner he left. A pad of yellow lined paper was clutched in his hand. When he dropped it on the coffee table, it revealed row after row of tight scribble, churning math, carrying down the page and occupying two entire pages more that Jack flipped through.

“Same baby I came up with in college. It just needed heavier dampening and higher voltage than what we made back then. The portal downstairs has that in spades. Well, in like two-thirds of a spade.” Jack tapped something on the last line. “The projection was still only hitting 70% of the threshold we calculated to reach dimension penetration. But it’s an art, not just a science. We fired it up anyway, and it took!”

Vlad grabbed the paper pad, agitated. His eyes ran over it. Then again. Until he settled on one line, a firmness overcoming his face. He tossed the pad back onto the coffee table, and Vlad leaned back into the couch, arms crossed.

“The lambda, Jack.”

“The lambda?”

“Check it again.”

Jack did, lips pursed, pad of paper nearly swallowed in his big meaty hand.

“What about--?”

“It squares. The units don’t balance otherwise. It originates from an integration step of λ*∂λ/∂t. It squares.”

Jack’s brow remained furrowed, firm, until delight cracked into his eyes, and he let out a laugh.

“Gods, my handwriting is gonna be the death of us. Mads,” he tapped something unseen on the second page. “That’s the genius of Vladdy. Cracked this puppy wide open with just a glance. I never noticed that in all my checking. That explains the missing 30%, at least. That explains how the portal took. Lucky for you Danny that Vlad was here—”

“Jack,” Maddie said.

“—your report can have the correct formula. It’ll be—”

“—Jack—”

“—A+ worthy—”

“—Jack,” Maddie said, curt. “Lambda is the ambient ecto-energy. It’s a few ten-thousandths of a unit.”

“It—huh.”

Maddie had surfaced a pen from her pocket. She sheared a few blank pages out from the back of the pad and started the formula fresh. She made quick work of copying it over, quicker work of solving it through – lambda-squared intact.

She hit the final line and hatched a pen mark beneath the number. Jack stared, confused.

“That can’t… no.”

He repeated the same. New pages torn loose. Formula copied over, processed, line by line by line—lambda squared—by line by line by line.

Jack settled on his answer. Same as Maddie’s.

Confusion made his face tense.

“So it’s not 70% of the way to the threshold… It’s 0.013% of the way to the threshold.”

He held the pen hard, his whole body holding firm and taut as the gears turned in his head. Jack’s eyes flickered across the formula, again and again and again. He looked to Maddie, like a dog issued a command he did not understand.

“But it worked,” he said, small. “But it worked.”

Jack stood, robotic almost, eyes lost in something far away. He disappeared into the lab almost as quickly as he had a few minutes before, but now he exited with a smoothness and a quietness so very uncharacteristic of him. It bothered Danny, somewhere deep in his gut.

Maddie followed, a possession matching Jack’s.

Danny’s fingers curled and uncurled. He’d succeeded. He’s successfully interrupted Vlad’s… whatever this was. But the disquiet infected him. He didn’t like it.

“So what does that mean?” Danny asked, perhaps to Vlad. “What’s wrong with the calculation?”

Vlad sipped on tea ice cold.

“Who knows?” Vlad lied.

…

The math didn’t work.

Maddie and Jack burned through paper, burned through pencils, burned through hours.

The math didn’t work.

Clothes stuck to skin. Sweat lingered fetid and stale in the cold basement air. Exhaustion beat like a slurry through their veins.

The math didn’t work.

The portal supervised all, placidly green, the light for their table, the light for their work when the lightbulb overhead burnt clean out and neither Jack nor Maddie could be pulled away to replace it. It stood, it watched, a testament of contradiction to everything they could not solve on paper, and yet everything they built directly into the fabric of reality.

And it should never have worked.

They threw every radical what-if they’d ever conceived over 20 years of ghost research.

The ecto-ether layer.

The latent activation stitches in space fabric.

The anti-ectomatter collision proposal.

The positive-feedback crystallization theory.

And still nothing worked.

All together, every crackpot theory in their favor taken for granted, racked them up to an activation energy 200x more potent than the calculation, and still just 2% of what would be needed to rip open, and hold open, a stable fissure between their reality and the ghost zone.

Maybe by pure luck, unfathomable luck, Fentonworks basement was directly situated atop a natural portal.

Maybe that would explain ripping it open. It did nothing to explain the stability. Natural portals were unstable by definition. There and gone in a few seconds. Not hours, days, weeks, months, a year, that the Fenton Portal had been open. Never so much as faltering.

It was late. 3am ticked away to 4am, and 4:30am. The discarded paper stacked higher than Jack and Maddie both. Calluses oozed from their hands at another attempt, and another, and another.

Maddie flipped through a folder’s worth of yellowed papers, aggressively thumbed over and over after two decades left untouched. And she settled on the one she’d passed over a few dozen times already, always seeking something else, something better.

This time she unsheathed it, and she placed it on the lab table.

“…If a mouse died. In the machine. If a mouse ran through the machine and accidentally bridged two live wires, and died of violent electrocution. 500 milliamps. Instantly melted into the circuitry.”

Maddie’s mouth was cotton-dry while she wrote. Ambient ecto-energy was low. Always very, very low.

Unless something very, very bad happened to something with the capacity to become a ghost.

The numbers wove. Maddie started the formula fresh, and it was pure muscle memory. A mouse. A big mouse, even. A 99th percentile beast of a mouse. And a wire that had been wired incorrectly. Something grounded that never actually grounded. An absolutely horrific amount of electricity.

0.37%, by pure numbers. If she included every permissive crackpot idea they had thrown on top, it topped out at 6% of the needed activation threshold.

Not a mouse.

“A cat,” Jack said, words gummy, tongue dry, face tired. “If we’ve got mice down here, maybe… a stray cat wandered in. Chased the mouse.”

Maddie nodded. It didn’t matter if it made sense.

She penned it in. A large cat. A devastating electrical short. Cats carried more ecto-potential than mice did. Ecto-potential did not necessarily go up with size. It went up with complexity. The things with the most ecto-potential were the things that most became ghosts.

1.45%, by pure numbers. 18% at absolute, absolute crackpot best.

“A dog,” Jack proposed with a shaky laugh. He swallowed. “A mouse… chased by a cat… chased by a dog… all electrocuted at once”

Maddie didn’t say the thing they both knew, which was that both of them would have noticed the evidence left behind by the electrically exploded pieces of a dog.

Maddie did it anyway. A mouse and a cat and a medium-sized dog, maybe just small enough to notice no evidence of, all together. All at once. All violently ripped apart, sacrificed to a machine still asleep in its wall.

Mice did not often make ghosts. Cats did not either. Dogs, occasionally. But infrequently. Very infrequently.

37%. At best.

“Jack.”

“Maddie, I know just—maybe something really smart—”

“—Jack—”

“—like an octopus—”

“Jack.”

“I hear, maybe, pigs are smart. If it was—”

Maddie was writing, already. Not for a pig. Not an octopus. Jack watched, and he knew what the numbers meant. The ecto-potential she penned gave her away. An ecto-potential that high.

65kg, an estimate

10,000 milliamps, a catastrophic accident, a death certificate.

A human’s amount of ecto-potential.

Maddie wrote.

And she wrote.

And she did not apply a single crackpot theory, not a single discredited proposal, not an ounce of exaggeration.

138%.

Threshold, and then some.

Comfortable, easily, then some.

For the first time, after all the hundreds of times she and Jack had penned this equation over the course of 2 decades, the number met her and Jack’s threshold.

A breakthrough.

A revelation.

A pure eureka moment.

Jack and Maddie were silent.

Alone in a humming basement. Alone with only the soft swirls of the portal for company, happy, stable, purring its contentment, singing to the cold air.

“It has to be something else,” Maddie said. And she said it weakly. And she said it childishly.

“You’re right. It can’t be this,” Jack echoed. “If someone died down here, we’d know. Dead bodies don’t walk away. We’d have seen it. O-or even if, if the body got stuck in the portal, we’d have heard of someone going missing.”

Maddie sat, quiet. A thought held her mind hostage.

“Unless they didn’t go missing,” Maddie said, and she said it barely audibly. “Unless the portal spit them right back out.”

“Then—that’s what I said—a dead body, on the floor, we’d have seen.”

“Not a dead body.”

“It had to be lethal, Mads—”

“I know Jack. But if they died, here, in the portal Jack, then their ghost did not get ripped away from the body and sent to the Ghost Zone. …They ripped the Ghost Zone here.” Palms slick with sweat smoothed over her notes. She pointed to one specific line and found her pen tip trembled no matter how badly she stabilized it. “The ecto-potential of a creature is how strong of a pull their ghost creates on the Ghost Zone. A strong enough pull means the ghost can reach the Ghost Zone and stabilize, like a fish reeling itself up, yeah? We agree on this Jack, yes?”

“Yes,” Jack answered.

“It’s what makes the math even work, Jack. Someone dying in the portal didn’t reel themselves to the boat. They reeled the boat in. Jack, they brought the Ghost Zone here…” Maddie wasn’t breathing right. She pulled sweat-soaked bangs away from her face. “Their ghost never left their body Jack. They died, Jack. And they walked back out.”

“…No. No,” Jack said. “No, they didn’t.”

“Then what?” Maddie asked.

Jack stared. He looked away. He didn’t like the expression on Maddie’s face.

“It—what about the ecto-ether theory?” Jack said, of the theory they’d tested and retested and tested all over, all night. He grabbed his pencil back up and pointed it aimlessly at Maddie’s piece of paper, pointed end out in self-defense. “If the ecto-ether is maybe… if it’s only 250-times stronger than we calculated. Then it could…”

Jack’s voice died. His pencil hung idle. Maddie’s paper remained unblemished.

“If it… was a pig,” Jack offered. “If it was a pig that died in the portal.”

“How, Jack? How would a pig get in? We lock all the doors at night, Jack. No one else can get in, Jack. It’s just us, Jack.”

Jack and Maddie were not there when the portal turned on.

Maddie’s statement carried two possibilities. Only two. Both felt like claws digging all the flesh right out of Jack’s heart.

“I want… I want to try the ecto-ether theory again,” Jack choked. “I think it’s the ecto-ether. I think it’ll work.”

Jack slid a piece of paper over, already covered in scribbles. In its single untouched corner, he started the equation for the several-thousandth time that night.

Above their head, birds were singing.

Sunrise hailed unseen from the windowless laboratory.

…

At 6am, Vlad answered his cell phone. The reception crackled, struggling through the layers of sheetrock above his head.

“Vlad?” Maddie’s voice crackled. “Sorry, did I wake you up?”

“Not at all my dear.” Vlad leaned his weight against the wall, playing with the singsong melody in his voice. “But you sound exhausted. Is anything the matter?”

“Yes. Well… Yes. Jack and I have—all night—trying to fix the equation.”

“Naturally.”

“We found something that maybe works.”

“Oh?” Vlad asked. He straightened, pacing now, cracklingly attentive. “And what might that—”

“If someone died. Activating the portal. We have an on-switch inside the portal’s interior. The trigger we use to press it is external to the portal, of course. But if someone went inside the portal, and they pressed it directly, and if they died, and pulled the Ghost Zone here—”

Vlad’s red eyes reflected pools of iridescent green. He twirled his free hand in the fringes of his cape, tongue working over the fanged edges of his teeth. He stared, consumed, forward.

“—and just, you, I was thinking, you’re the only other expert I’d trust to… maybe weigh in.”

“What does Jack think?”

“He denies it. He’s still. He’s trying other theories.”

“Well who knows, surely? The answer may lie somewhere you haven’t looked.”

“…I’ve looked everywhere, Vlad. That's the thing. There is no more ‘somewhere else’. I’ve looked.”

“You sound like your mind is made up.”

“I just… if maybe you have some idea.”

“Am I meant to talk you out of this idea?”

“Vlad.”

“Do you think I have some secret information you don’t? Sorry to say, I’m just your skeptic.” Some noise came through muffled from the other side. Vlad flashed a smile. “But…as your skeptic I will offer you this—It all sounds a bit absurd, doesn’t it? To kill someone and have them come back intact and… for you to never notice? Who would they be? How would they be? Surely not human anymore, surely. How would you never notice?”

Vlad paced forward, booted feet clicking along his laboratory floor.

“It would be ridiculous,” he continued, with a building crescendo, “so unfathomably self-centered surely, to not notice something like that befall someone so close to you, who died at the hands of your own invention? …If I’m correctly inferring who, in your household, you suspect of having activated the portal?” Vlad’s tongue lingered along his teeth.

Maddie’s line held, quiet. And the seconds of static drew long.

“Ah, apologies. I’ve overstepped,” Vlad continued. “I meant this as a vote of confidence in you. You and Jack both. Two people as attentive, caring, compassionate as yourselves. You would notice. I promise.”

“You’re… Okay, thank you, Vlad. I appreciate it.”

“Is there anything else, my dear?”

“No. No. Thank you, Vlad. I’ll think about this.”

Maddie’s line clicked dead. A chuckle built to Vlad’s lips and he let his head tip back with mirth. It lasted only a moment. He stowed his phone. And as if the interruption had never happened, Vlad reaffixed his attention on his own portal swirling in front of him. It bathed him, swimming green, purring contentment.

And Vlad vanished into his portal.